Developing a Community-Based Carbon Footprint Questionnaire: Towards a Dynamic Understanding of How Personal Behaviour Interacts with Policy and Economic Change

Carbon footprint measures evidence the impact of organizations and individuals’ contribution to climate change. They can facilitate critical reflection. A community carbon footprint questionnaire is developed in cooperation with local people to enable them to reflect on how to reduce their personal carbon footprint in relation to their social and economic context. The instrument is operationalised in an Anglican church community who have stated an aim to reduce their footprint. It is designed to help participants make a self-assessment of where their behaviour change will make the most social impact. There are three components to the total score: (A) transportation, (B) accommodation energy use, and (C) consumer behaviour. Forty two participants respond. The average carbon footprint score is 5.8 tonnes per annum. Older and middle-aged people are more likely to have a higher footprint than younger adults. This is associated with them having a larger accommodation and being more dependent on private cars. Accommodation energy use contributes the most to the participants’ total scores. Living in smaller accommodation and sharing an accommodation reduces an individual’s carbon footprint. The second largest component is transportation, with the use of diesel- and petrol-fuelled cars contributing the biggest impact, especially where mileage is high. A minority are moving towards electric and hybrid cars. Finally, the smallest contributing component is consumer behaviour, where participants’ scores are the least dispersed in the sample compared to the other components and closer to the mean average. Participants are more likely to make commitments to changing consumer behaviour than changing transportation and domestic energy use and often focus on recycling, reducing the consumption of meat and new goods, and repairing older items. In contrast, when the results are located in the context of changes in policy, the simplest gains to reducing carbon footprints are related to changing behaviour in the purchase of household electricity to ensure the purchase of renewable power. Other important considerations are reducing the size and heated area of an individual’s accommodation space, or sharing an accommodation with more people, and moving away from the use of diesel- and petrol-fuelled private transportation, instead using public transport, cycling, and walking. More complex and expensive strategies for individuals are installing solar panels and heat pumps for accommodation energy generation, and switching personal transportation to electric cars. Policy analysis suggests that participants were largely unaware of new opportunities to change their consumption of electricity towards renewable generation by purchasing greener electricity options.